Here is our ABC to this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival which opens today
Frank Benson Edinburgh Art Festival National Gallery of Scotland 31 July – 31 August 2014
American Impressionism: A New Vision
Frank Weston Benson Eleanor 1901 Oil on canvas Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.
John Byrne has two shows on in Edinburgh at the moment; one in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the other at Bourne Gallery on Dundas Street.
The Edinburgh-based artist recently began his Bourne show with a unique offering to under 25 year olds – buy one of his works for a bargain price from £20 upwards! The Edinburgh Reporter interviewed him just before the show opened.
Augusto Corrieri is a performance artist and writer whose work will be shown at Rhubaba Gllery and Studios.
Craig Coulthard has produced a video work imagining a ceremony in the future commemorating heroism among machines and exploring Scottish national identity installed at Trinity Apse.
- Preparatory sketch 2014
Craig Coulthard’s practice encompasses a broad range of media and scale, from the extraordinarily ambitious (and still evolving) Forest Pitch, a lifesize football pitch created in a Borders woodland; to smaller objects often referencing craft traditions – banners, handpainted plates, rugs. The work is united by a common concern, the artist’s extended enquiry into identity, history and memory.
Coulthard’s latest work, a film installation, imagines a commemoration ceremony of the future, where the heroic deeds of machines are publicly acknowledged and remembered. The drone of the title refers to that
most quintessentially Scottish of instruments, the bagpipe, but also to the unmanned robotic aircraft deployed in contemporary military campaigns and humanitarian rescue operations.
Deliberately ambiguous, Coulthard’s film suggests the contradictions inherent in a succession of romanticised images. The bagpipe and drums are now firmly established as essential to Scottish ceremonial (military and civilian), perhaps precisely for the reason that they were once outlawed. The Scottish landscape is understood as a beautiful natural wilderness, largely untouched by humans, yet it is home to dangerous and destructive weapons. The technology of the future can be used to threaten the very systems that developed it.
Trinity Apse, Chalmers Close, 42 High Street, EH1 1SS
Mon–Sun, 10am–6pm
Please note that this historic venue does not offer wheelchair access.
Jacqueline Donachie’s work Mary and Elizabeth is a publicly sited work connecting places and important moments in the city in a series of drawn lines all meeting at a central focal point, featuring new public sculptures in Princes Street Gardens.
Donachie works largely outside formal gallery contexts, often making work in collaboration with specialist disciplines, or with the direct involvement of the general public. Fascinated by public space, her recent work has explored how we navigate towns and cities. Slow Down, conceived for the small market town of Huntly in 2009, and subsequently realised in the profoundly different contexts of Melbourne (2013) and Glasgow (2014), invited cyclists to follow a route through a city, making a giant chalk drawing in the process.
Donachie’s new work Mary and Elizabeth connects history with the present day through an evanescent line of red pigment journeying through the city, and linking two sculptures situated on either side of the railway line which cuts right through the centre of Princes Street Gardens.
The artist imagines ‘…a timely journey, a connection fuelled by knowledge, lore and literature that loops from popular novels of scandal and sentiment (Waverley by Sir Walter Scott was first published 200 years ago this summer, in July 1814) to historic conspiracy and bloodshed, all connecting through a national debate around democracy, identity and governance.’
Part of GENERATION East and West Princes Street Gardens, EH2 2HG Mon–Sun, 7am–10pm
Alice Finbow is in residence at Manna House Bakery.
David Galletly is a Scottish illustrator who designed this year’s map with a very detailed drawing of the city. It provides you with details of what is on and where it is happening.
Shilpa Gupta will have an outdoor work on show at the Old Royal High School.
Michelle Hannah is to create a 3D work involving video and computers and her performance as what she calls a ‘dystopian chanteuse’.
Romanticism is a key influence in the work of artist, performer and singer Michelle Hannah. Influenced by the founding constraints of Cabaret, she aims to engage, entice and repulse in equal measure through her use of artifice. Hannah exploits and extends this theatrical heritage in her performances, which explore the themes of technology, gender, identity and fame. For her festival commission she will produce a new body of video and computer based 3D work relating to her performance as a ‘dystopian chanteuse’ and consisting primarily of photographic prints, 3D scanning technology and ‘models’ appropriated from a digital landscape. Whilst being based on ‘real’ objects, (microphones, props, costume and the anatomy of the artist’s scanned body) the models are rendered into inventions rather than naturalistic representations, becoming hybrids of machine and organism, performer and sculpture, sound and vision.
Ellie Harrison has a new work featuring four huge streamer cannons which will be activated depending on the outcome of the Scottish Independence referendum. We rather like the idea of this, although clearly the referendum is on 18 September 2014 which is long after the Art Festival has ended.
There are films to go along with the Where do I begin exhibition and a UK premiere of Gavin Hipkins Erewhon at the Filmhouse
Amar Kanwar will present his work Sovereign Forest in the fabulous debating chamber at the Royal High School which we managed to glimpse earlier this year. The building was to be used as the Scottish Parliament building after the unsuccessful 1979 referendum, but has lain empty for a number of years and may yet become Edinburgh’s newest hotel.
Edinburgh Art Festival The Fruitmarket Gallery 31 JULY – 31 AUGUST 2014 Jim Lambie
Jim Lambie Shaved Ice 2012 (Colourful ladders) © The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd
Stills Gallery show works curated by Owen Logan which reflects on the modern world and its peace and security.
Edinburgh’s leading galleries are hosting a series of live performances beginning with Eilidh MacAskill’s The Conference Call of the Birds at the City Art Centre.
Shona Macnaughton has a new film called Plan of the Principal Story showing off the architectural power of Edinburgh University buildings.
Nalini Malani’s exhibition called In Search of Vanished Blood. This celebrates the outbreak of WWI and is a projection of images using video and shadow play onto the exterior of the gallery at the foot of The Mound described as ‘haunting’.
Nalini Malani is one of four leading international artists invited to make work as part of LIGHTS OUT, a UK-wide event marking the centenary of the start of the First World War. Profoundly affected by her own childhood experience of India’s Partition, her work is an extended exploration of conflict, religious and military. She is particularly interested in the female experience of war (real and mythological), and has often returned to the figure of Cassandra, the ignored prophesier of doom in ancient Greek myth.
To mark the extraordinary moment of the centenary, as part of a joint project with 14-18 NOW, WW1 Centenary Art Commissions, Malani develops a new externally-sited presentation of In Search of Vanished Blood. Here the artist’s pictorial plane becomes the city itself, as she uses large-scale projections to cover the full Western and Southern facades of Playfair’s iconic Scottish National Gallery building on the Mound. With a choreographed succession of Malani’s artistic interpretation of the images of war, we witness through the eyes of a young woman the pain and grief of violence. Through her distinctive combination of video and shadow play, Malani presents a world of on-going collective wars of which we have all become a part, and to which there is as yet no solution.
Leon Morrocco and his wonderful travel based paintings are on show at the Open Eye Gallery .
Janie Nicoll and Edinburgh-based Italian Alessandro di Massimo will have solo exhibitions at Interview Room 11.
And perhaps saving the best for last? Yann Seznec is employing one of our wonderful police boxes in an innovative sound installation featuring computer fans now recycled and used to create air movement around the visitor, all dependent on real time weather data. There are so many of these police boxes which are lying empty and we are very glad to see one being put to good use. Do tell us what you think about this particular installation! Then you can go and add a photo to our Police Boxes storyboard over here….
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
